Monday, December 23, 2013

I'd like to thank Joe McCray for recommending it to me. I wish i had read the book in my teens and/or my twenties. There are TONS of reviews on the book i'd encourage everyone remotely interested to read a mix of the 5 star and 1 star ones to get a feel. I'll even drop the most important thing i got from the book here:

Assets make you money, liabilities cost you money. To build wealth you need to accumulate assets.

Pretty simple right?! Unfortunately most of us (myself included) have been brought up to look at things like houses, cars, expensive things as assets because we can sell them if we need to for $$. However after being a former BMW owner and a current house owner i can attest that the mentioned items did not *make* me any money. In fact the house is a constant source of cash outflow. This is exactly what the book talks about.

Now to be fair, and if you read the reviews this will come across, there is A LOT of magic hand waving on how one starts buying assets instead of liabilities and growing wealth. The author uses real estate and mentions you can start a business or build wealth via stocks/trading as other ways to build wealth (assets). None of those in my opinion are quick, easy, or cheap to get started in and none of those come without a hefty education requirement in order not to lose your starting capital. Nevertheless, the value in the book comes from identifying the problem of how poor people view and interact with money and how rich people view and interact with money as well as giving a general road map on a new way to think about building wealth.